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I’ve recently been experimenting with UE4 level, character mechanics and ui creation. Here are some of the results in a mini project i'm calling Skelly Bash. The videos below show some of the networked play showing the characters state and animations being synchronised across the network along with attacks and spawning mechanics.

For a number of projects over the last few years i’ve tried to implement networking in a rush to add that extra element of fun through multiplayer etc or to simply interconnect two apps, however implementing networking under tight time restrictions can be a mammoth task. Over the last few projects where I have used c# I have been putting together a easy and quick to use networking library.

The library assists in the building of packets and sending them between clients and a central server. To stay away from bulky and slow serialization techniques that are available in the .net framework (XmlSerializer and BinarySerializer for example), the library offers its own form of lightweight and quick packet serialization. There is also a C++11 implementation of the client available, along with a portable version of the packet builder and serializer.

For more information or to check out the source head over to Github Here : https://github.com/sbatman/Sbatman.Networking
It is also available as a Nuget Package...

I have been attempting to implement the flying/driving mechanics for a wipeout style game programmed in c++ for UE4. The ship has 6 downward facing range checkers and matching thrusters attempting keep the vehicle level resulting in a hovering style effect, keeping to the orientation of the ground below resulting in a sliding effect. The video shows the vehicle in flight around a test course I produced, and then a few tests with moving volumes below the thrusters to show how it reacts.

Another Ludum Dare, another Phaser.io powered game. I didn't have much time for it this weekend however as the subject was “The future is now”, I had to give it a go. Several years ago I worked on a game called Avoid for pc, xbox and mobile. At the time I said something like “In the future i’d like to do a little HTML5 port of this”. Well the future is now and here it is.

The Weekend is over, and for me so is the jam. Its been an incredible weekend using Phaser (phaser.io) again to produce a fun little HTML5 game. We sourced a large amount of our resources from OpenGameArt.org and below you’ll find a list of thank you’s to the artists that contributed to the game. Its been an amazing Game jam and I’ll be looking forward to the next one, and whilst it is only the second time i’ve used Typescript I really see it growing on me.

Play the game : --Link Broken--
Ludum Dare Website : http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=33819
Get the source : http://github.com/sbatman/LD29

At the end of last month (March 21st – 23rd) Edwin Jones and I decided to give the mini Ludum Dare a go. Despite both of us being fairly limited on the amount of time we were able to commit that weekend, we decided to give not only a new SDK a go ( Phaser ) but we also decided to learn a new language at the same time. Typescript turned out to be an absolute joy to work with, as a subset of JavaScript currently being developed by Microsoft to work with their Visual Studio Suite it had the C# feel. We put together a simple side scrolling endless runner game as our submission to the GameJam, far from a difficult concept so we could spend a little more time investigating the language.

With the rapidly growing power in the PC market hard-disk space, ram and processing power seems to be increasing constantly. But every now and again there is a squeeze for optimisations to try and get a game under that 15GB target, or less than 8GB ram usage, and whilst that is a challenge it doesn't compare to that of the Demoscene. A subculture that thrives in the tight requirements of a spectrum Rom or the ram restrictions of a C64, pushing to maximise the capabilities of their demos within the limitations of the hardware. For those eager to push the boundaries competitions still run such as :

Scene
Scene.org Awards is a way of honouring the previous year of demoscene releases in a more formal setting, and disregarding their ranks in other competitions.

JS1K
This is a competition about JavaScript scripts no larger than 1k. Starting out as a joke, the first version ended with a serious amount of submissions, prizes and quality.

It’s been a few weeks since my first post regarding my attempt to produce a Z80 emulator and much has changed. What appeared a few weeks ago to be a fairly simple endeavour turned out to be a significantly longer development than I had expected. With this post I will walk you through some of the issues I encountered and how I tackled them, but first the interesting part.

Get the Source
As of the time of this post I have made the source of the Emulator available on my Github HERE.
This version has a vast majority of the Opcodes added and tested, with an example test program that emulates drawing a diagonal line on the screen of a ZX Spectrum 48k.

Getting the Facts
The Zilog Z80 CPU is an extremely well documented core due to its wide use and age, so getting the information I needed to build the emulator was never a challenge. I would give you a large list of links that I found useful, however I’d be wasting your time thanks to this fantastic...

So this weekend I had the overwhelming urge to start creating an emulator for the first time in a fair few years. After a little googling around the internet I stumbled upon the documentation for the Z80 CPU which can be found in the ZX Spectrum 48k (of which i’m a massive fan), and so it became a weekend project.

The Z80 was an 8bit processor created by Zilog sometime in the late 1970’s, finding its way into a large number of embedded circuits and desktops into the late 1980’s. It was built with the following :

6 x 8 bit registers (that could be treated as 3 16 bit registers)
one Accumulator
one 8 bit flags register
A second bank that mirrored the above
3 x 16 bit index registers (one of which is the stack pointer)
8 bit interrupt vector
8 bit refresh counter
16 bit program counter
More information on the chip can be found HERE

Hiding away on the internet you can find a number of large PDFs describing in detail...

So you want to start developing some applications for your Raspberry PI but your knowledge of programming is limited to the modern .net languages such as vb .net and c#. Not a problem!!

Welcome to the world of mono, an opensource cross platform and compatible version of the .net framework. By using a development IDE such as Visual studio or even better Mono Develop (http://monodevelop.com/) you can produce exe’s that will run on your Raspberry PI. All you need to do is to install the mono run times on the Raspberry PI. To do that we enter the following lines

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install mono-runtime

As mentioned in other tutorials the first line is used to update the APT-GET package manager to ensure it is using the latest sources for downloading your packages. The second line installs and prepares the runtimes for use. That is it, now to run a mono developed exe just simply prefix the command with the word mono as shown below.